The aim of this post is to provide a work in progress demo of how using titles for your paragraphs can structure your writing. The idea is that each paragraph has a named purpose in bold. I remove these before submitting the article. The titles add up to a narrative for the paper and so help structure what each part does.

A darknet vendor of forged dollars and their community: a distributed community of illicit practice

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand a particular kind of criminal association which allows for cooperation and evaluation of a shared crime script and that functions as a distributed community of illicit practice. This article presents a crime script analysis of a darknet cryptomarket based counterfeit currency vendor and their community, putting the script into a technical-material context. It outlines the two interlinked crime scripts covering the last two stages of the counterfeit currency distribution system, for the currency vendor and middleman, ‘Benjamin’, and the buyer who will use the currency. The discussion forum allows each script to be fine tuned and creates feedback for the vendor on the quality and effectiveness of the notes. The online community is critical to the distribution of the notes and to their effective use. It forms a learning infrastructure, promotes semi-professional performances and evaluates risk. Counterfeit cash use is both a rationally structured crime, and an expressive one.

Introduction: Community developed modus operandi

What the study does: This paper describes the final stages of a counterfeit currency distribution network operating using a Tor darknet cryptomarket, covering the phase from secondary distribution to retail use. Cryptomarkets have gained prominence as novel market infrastructures primarily for the distribution of illicit drugs (Barratt and Aldridge 2016). The cryptomarket is shown to function as the ‘last mile’ distributor  (Dittus, Wright, and Graham 2017) of counterfeit currency to buyers who will use it in the field, either individually or in tandem with an organised group.  The case shows an example of a functioning supply chain from producer to final user and demonstrates how the darknet functions as both a distribution mechanism for the product and a learning environment for distributor and users, where they share user defined crime scripts for the successful use of counterfeit currency. The paper focuses on the process by which users develop and test effective crime scripts, what it tells about their priorities, their accounts of motive, and how they position themselves in relation to the wider illicit economy. It theorises the particular kind of criminal association involved as a distributed community of illicit practice, where networks are anonymous and temporary but effective in assessing the technical value of counterfeit notes and the practical risks and challenges involved in their use.

Suggest an audience: Counterfeiting is tackled by a range of bodies including the specialist policing taskforces such as the UK National Crime Agency Central Office for the Suppression of Counterfeit Currency and Protected Coins, central banks, and retailer/banking business organisations . Why it matters: Forged currency involves immediate risks to those handling the notes and longer term potential harms in damaging trust in the cash economy. There is a concentration of harm among frontline staff and smaller businesses. Cashiers or waiting staff who unwittingly handle fake notes might have their wages docked or be prosecuted. Smaller businesses which handle more cash will likewise be more at risk. It damages trust and costs are socialised to the rest of the economy. The most cash dependent demographic in society is also the part of the population that has least access to banking systems and credit and are most reliant on cash for paying and being paid (Lupo-Pasini 2021). As economies become more digitised and cash is steadily squeezed out of mainstream payment processes the harm of counterfeiting is increasingly concentrated among the more marginalized groups. Concerted efforts to tackle counterfeiting by reducing dependence on cash and actively targeting counterfeiting does not improve their position nor create alternative routes to finance for them. In fact it may have a damaging effect on the unbanked and technologically marginalised, particularly in developing country contexts (Wang 2020).

Get this in proportion: Currency counterfeiting is relatively uncommon. In 2003 the US Federal Reserve estimated that less than 1 in 10000 currency notes were counterfeit (Judson and Porter 2003), a result also reported for the Canadian dollar (Chant 2004) and estimated at 1 in 40,000 for the UK Pound Sterling (Bank of England 2022). Counterfeiting of the Indian Rupee is more common and appears to have been rising significantly from 2019 (Reserve Bank of India 2019, 2022). Money laundering through electronic means and crimes such as cheque fraud and card-not-present fraud are much more significant in terms of loss and in spreading corruption and funding the activities of organised criminal groups.  Changes in the era of debt led/credit fuelled capitalism have further limited the opportunities for counterfeiting currency when more lucrative rewards lie in defrauding the banking sector (Kahn and Roberds 2008). Improved detection of fakes and improved note design have increased the technical demands on counterfeiters. Despite that there is still enough of an incentive for the practice to persist and even grow among some currencies such as the rupee, while there has in contrast been a decline in counterfeit euro circulation (European Central Bank 2021).

We should still care: Despite the challenges presented to counterfeiters, cash forgery persists. It evolves and shifts with the value put on various cash types and denominations, and the security/detection technology employed by central banks. Increasingly banknotes are designed as one element of a technological whole which encompasses surveillance, processing and detection technologies. The rise of automated processing points such as supermarket autopay terminals changes the process away from human detection. Machines can be designed to be more sensitive to particular aspects of the note such as precise weight or shape. These changed technological assemblages shift common understandings of what cash is in symbolic and practical terms, for example, from a store of capital to an object of value that can vary independently of its stated face value (Lemon 1998). Hinge – it’s a niche but an interesting one: However populations do at times return to cash. The growth in cash using during the pandemic also makes it likely that there are more opportunities for counterfeiting. Forgery may be beginning to matter more. At November 2021, US currency in circulation amounted to 2,116.4 US$ billion in seasonally adjusted figures, 9.9% of the M2 money supply (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve 2021). Despite the general move to digital payments, the cash supply has steadily grown throughout 2020/21 along with a broad increase in the money supply. The growth reflects central banks’ intervention in the economy under the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore cash continues to matter both as a technological system and one which has an evolving significance alongside its digital counterpart.

A theoretical postulate shows my contribution: Counterfeiting has a role in the crime business model. The main problem in maintaining the counterfeit currency economy is that to have any use value notes must circulate into the real economy quickly and in so doing are effectively nullified. They are detected and eliminated or become in any case useless to the criminals producing and using them. Criminals depend on the interface with the licit economy to wash fake notes into real money or goods. As a result the counterfeit economy is inherently parasitic on both the legal and illegal economies and is no way self sustaining, in contrast to for example the illicit drug market. Furthermore there a tension in the business model. To make the most from them counterfeit notes need to be of high value ($50 and $100) which are likely to attract more scrutiny when used. For lower denominations such as $10 or $20 many more transactions will have to take place to put them into use, raising the time and labour cost. Businesses learn from counterfeit ‘attacks’ and therefore are risky to hit more than once. All that makes it difficult to keep a counterfeit currency business going.

This is an interesting intersection: Counterfeit currency is characterised by many embedded techno-material factors such as the advent of desktop publishing and laser printing. The US Federal Reserve in 2003 note the cost of creating plausible counterfeits (Judson and Porter 2003). However distributed digitally enabled manufacturing appears to have brought some of the startup/fixed capital costs down (Li and Rocheteau 2011) and offset lithography can produce quality notes rapidly (NCA). Distribution is still very costly as they must be widely spread in order to be successful used. That may be an area where things have changed given the expansion in money mule and other distributed money laundering activity which lends itself more easily to counterfeit currency distribution. Therefore the counterfeit business has a number of challenges. It needs to maintain a throughput of users who can be upskilled to effectively make use of the product, be technologically adept, and has to manage the physical process of distribution. Second contribution I make: The paper takes the approach that counterfeit current distribution use is a rational and expressive form of techno-crime (Hayward 2007).. While one approach has been to analyse techno-crime as a modality (Van Nguyen 2021) I analyse it as a material context constitutive of criminal actors’ capacities. As technology is now so embedded we have to move past that and think of tech as part of the material matrix combining different technological forms and virtual and real world spaces.

The field make an effective case study because: Cryptomarkets are an effective part of that matrix. They are open, anonymous markets hosted using the Tor onion hosting service. Combined with bitcoin or another cryptocurrency payment system they allow goods to be sold in relative anonymity and without buyer and seller meeting. The seller posts a product listing and the buyer pays using a decentralised cryptocurrency which is held in market escrow. The package is sent to them through postal service, courier or dead drop. On receipt, or after a certain amount of time has elapsed, the payment is released to the seller. At least in theory that is the process, however increasingly sellers require payments immediately, showing how power shifts in a retail market towards the seller (Childs et al. 2020). The main meat of cryptomarkets is illicit drugs. The vast majority of the trades taking place are in illicit drugs. Despite the drug trade up to that point being cash heavy, a part of it was able to transfer to being a digitally mediated, remote business. Alongside drug markets, other trades existing, in for example malware, stolen goods, and counterfeit currency. Counterfeit currency is an example of a product which in theory could adapt well to cryptomarket distribution but that faces several conceptual and practical challenges in doing so.

Show direction: This article will examine the micro-process of last mile distribution and the interface between user purchase and practice.  Research Questions this paper addresses:

1. What crime scripts are used by currency vendors and buyers?
2. How do counterfeit vendor and user make use of the technical/material qualities of the notes?
3. How does the social structure of the vendor-user relationship work with or against the CS?
4. How does counterfeit currency operate as part of its own technical assemblage

Method

Introduce the conceptual construct: the criminal community shares and tests the crime script against real world practice. Scripts are not wholly evolved and are going to be adapted all the time. The community closes the loop on that. The crime script consists of three basic stages prepare/pre-empt, doing/actualizing, end state/reset. It has to function as a whole set, a failure in one element cause the script to cease functioning. The crime script encapsulates the conditions for the act to occur, the preparation, entry/action and exit requirements and the post-condition. Dividing the script into its strategic and tactical components allows interventions to be planned which disrupt the criminal opportunity.

How the large case set links to the concept: Cryptomarkets are a place of ‘offender convergence’ (Felson 2006) characterized by ‘extended co-offending’ (Felson 2009), and they have some unique qualities as criminogenic spaces. Offenders can liaise and share intelligence and material without meeting. They provide a quality feedback loop where buyers discuss and compare products. They can be a testing ground for new products and new criminal business models. The particular cryptomarket hosting Benjamin is an open model. Anyone can join. Most goods and services can be offered, other than child pornography. Vendors may restrict customers according to location, willingness to spend, or a preexisting relationship.

The research design is constrained by the data: The project uses a single case study of a discussion between counterfeit dollar vendor and their customers. The discussion takes place over a long time period, allowing the evolving practice of both vendor and users to be followed. Mapping vendor and user crime scripts allowed me to systematise my understanding of their practice and develop a generalised outline of each players’ approach to executing their crime.

The paper makes a methodological contribution: Methodologically, the paper addresses a challenge of criminological research with dispersed entities, non-synchronous interactions, non-human. Draw on existing social research such as ethnography of infrastructures, multi-sited ethnography, hybrid ethnography ‘Material’ = : I analyse the technology used in material terms rather than as the crime medium. Beyond tech as a modality/fabric for crime and onto tech as a material context constitutive of actors.

Outline the general process of how I got here: Crime script analysis is a sequence analysis method of criminal knowledge formation. It follows four broad stages: Preparation – identification of opportunity and means. Assembly – putting the criminal into place, assembling the necessary precursors. Commission – the crime commission itself. Post-activity – getting away, extracting value, other necessary end states to reset the sequence (Chainey and Alonso Berbotto 2021). Each stage can be broken down into further elements depending on need. Dehghanniri and Borrion (2016) model the process to produce the crime script. The first step defines the problem, such as wage theft or dumping waste in the environment. It also shows what the crime script is intended to do which guides the analyst to the level of detail needed. An analysis that will be used in deploying surveillance will have different needs to one which seeks to change compliance rules. The second step elaborates the information requirements which flow from that: the analyst might be interested more in how this crime is committed, who is involved, and/or what facilitates it.  The narrative analysis was key to allowing me to understand much more about how the script was developed and finessed by the group.

The specific process, neatly: The discussion was first open coded and then recoded according to the crime script stages for both the vendor and currency users as in table 1. Critical stages, cast and conditions for each process, vendor and user, were identified as detailed by Thompson and Chainey (2011). Contextualisation codes such as ‘Deference to community’ were also created. Context codes were in part derived from the existing literature, for example, the importance of claims to ‘insider’ roles and knowledge (Holt and Lee 2020). This was done in order to place the CSA in a material context. Matrix coding was then conducted cross tabulating the contextualizing codes with the CSA codes. These codes fed into the crime script coding, for example, technical features were coded and then distributed according to their function in the precondition/actualisation parts of the script. That exposed the technical, stealth, performative and organisational features at different stages of the CS execution. Cases were created for each contributor to the forum and the attribute function was used to record their role/stance. Text was coded to every contributor. Possible roles were: vendor, valid buyer, sock puppet. The forum has 72 cases of which x were xx. Vignettes were created for each participant, providing a sketch of their participation, for example, whether they changed position or left over time. Open data principles have been applied. The dataset is available and archived by the University of Edinburgh.

Findings

Meta criminal context: Benjamin (gender unknown) is a re-seller for the supplier Willy.Clock who had developed a public profile at the time and was known to the other members of the forum, and who was supported by another distributor, Mr. Mouse (Krebs 2014). Willy.clock is a Uganda based counterfeiter, Ryan Andrew Gustafson who was arrested in 2014 and who pled guilty in 2018 to charges of counterfeiting.

There is a network of sites validating each other so participants do not take anything on trust: Another onion site hosted support for note users and was used to validate the identities of distributors as a basic authenticity check. There was a well known distribution logic at work: The NCA states that criminal networks operate by breaking bulk production into smaller units that can be distributed and used by lower level criminals, so this appears to be a case of that being done. Benjamin introduces themselves in what becomes a long thread where buyers return to critique their product and debate how it should be used. Benjamin responds by defending the product, saying that buyers are using it improperly, and eventually agreeing that the counterfeit notes are not what they were.

Define the process in stages: The process is one of a spiral where the notes are tested in real world use and refined. The scrip derived from Benjamin and friends is therefore part of a meta-crime script involving the testing and innovation of the production process. Benjamin’s second stage role meant they could palm off some of the responsibility for poor quality product onto the supplier. The discussion was characterised by in depth explorations of the technical features of the notes, their consistency and reliability. Some participants appeared to be much closer to Benjamin and interacted with them outside the forum via a messaging service. Contributors ranged from these close accomplices to more casual users of the notes who were much less committed to the crime script.

The group context: To an extent the group as a whole worked on developing their crime script through comparing different experiences with using the notes, their opinions on their technical qualities, and advice about how to successfully use them without being detected. In this way what mattered to them became apparent. The technical qualities of the notes were a means to an end: their ability to use them successfully and then use the knowledge gained to buy more. Successful repeat use was

The interactional context: the forum allows for critique and requires a level of commitment from Benjamin. Benjamin introduces themselves as a known quantity, with feedback from another cryptomarket, the Black Market. They set out the security features of the product they are selling. It is claimed to be single ply, a security strip on the $100 dollar note, the ability to pass the pen test, a watermark, accurate colour using offset lithography, colour shifting ink, microprinting, a believable physical texture and resilience when dunked in water. The product seems to be high quality. Benjamin immediately adds a caveat. The bills do not contain magnetic ink, ferrofluid added to the bill to give it a distinct magnetic signature. That allows machines to distinguish between denominations and to reject fakes. Benjamin begins with a clear statement: any problems in passing the currency off as real are due to the failure of the buyer to adhere to an effective protocol.

Narrative breakdown: the thread begins positively. It all began so well – the golden period: sales and feedback are good. Benjamin begins with $100 notes and teases customers with the prospect of $50s and $20s. Early on after the thread begins they claim to have sold 300 $100 notes, for a face value of $30,000. Amounts purchased ranged up to 100 notes, $10,000 face value. They charge 50% of the face value of the notes though bulk buyers can obtain a larger discount. Buyers express excitement and anticipation for Benjamin receiving new stocks to pass onto them. The first bat h is well received. The second batch Benjamin sends out much less so. The quality of the notes deteriorates and users become disgruntled. A back and forth happens with one critic called out as a shill, and gradually disgruntlement builds as other users who had previously praised the notes now begin to question them. At this point the forum starts to divide. Users who have success with the notes allege that it is buyer failure to use them properly that is responsible for any problems.

If anybody finds their notes so atrocious, dunk them in water and wash all of the pen treatment off. It won’t pass the pen test, but it will sure as hell feel like real money … Alternatively, read through the forums and pay attention to what others to do give them their own touch. I’m not into replying to this negative BS, but I’ll manage to give you these few pointers.” Benjamin

One instance of a general phenomenon: As with other illicit and legal markets, there is a tendency towards bulking up sales following initial success. Benjamin decides to set a five note minimum order. Some buyers respond that this freezes them out. Note quality starts to decline:

“Lastly, and this is what is everyones biggest complain/concern so far, is the feel. Unless the clerk is wearing gloves I don’t know how they wouldn’t notice most of the bills waxy feel in comparison to the real notes. So that would be a dead give away to people who handle money regularly.”

Narrative turn with some colour: There then begins a conflictual phase in which Benjamin alternatively defends themselves and disappears for a time, stating they are working on fixing the problems with the notes that buyers have started to identify.  Some participants sought to defend the operation from criticism. In one section, the discussion focused on security researcher Krebs (link) was sent counterfeit notes which he described as not being of very good quality. Several participants explained this away as a fakeout by Willy.Clock, the producer:

I think it was an inside operation by WC and Mouse if I had to guess, and ya thousands and thousands of retailers use Krebs and even catch up with him on Twitter, and everything seen on Krebs gets instantly passed down to loads of other websites and news sites too, if you google Mr Mouse counterfeits he’s all over the place thanks to Krebs.

The aim, they allege, was for the producer to spread misinformation to retailers about what they should look for in counterfeit notes.Complaints pile up on the forum. Orders do not arrive on time, quality suffers and communication with Benjamin becomes patchy. Benjamin stalls for time, promising refunds if the deliveries do not appear, which annoys customers whose money Benjamin has. Benjamin blames the market’s administrative system for problems and asks buyers to contact them directly and pay in bitcoin, triggering another round of criticism as this process gives the buyers no guarantees. The tone of the forum changes. Previous supportive members write long, highly critical posts. Benjamin struggles with justifying the perceived declining quality of the notes and promising improvements. They claim that the loss of quality is a matter of perception, that initial enthusiasm for the notes inflated expectations, and admits to some lower quality notes being shipped due to the influx of new orders limiting their quality control processes. Benjamin is suspended for a time by his supplier for failing to communicate well with their clients, and for not properly prepping the notes before sale, as the supplier begins to worry about the blowback from negative experiences with the notes Benjamin sells.

Benjamin complains about his relationship with the forum and sometimes the supplier, Willy.Clock. There is some suspicion that starting with good stock is a strategy to then switch buyers to less convincing notes. Some buyers acknowledge that they are on the lowest point on the food chain, and are unlikely to be offered supernotes which sell for much more and go to better invested users. Buyers argue with Benjamin and each other about the work they needed to do to the notes to make them look and feel more plausible.

I also went and just tried to play around with a note myself and I sprayed it with acrylic matte spray after putting it in water and drying it off and pressed it in the pages of a book and put a table leg on that. Now it’s fantastic! If the paper is good the rest of the note is great!!

Narrative closure: Benjamin in response goes on sabbatical in order to address the problems with the notes that buyers have identified, returning with what are claimed as notes that pass the pen test and feel close to the real thing. Enthusiasm resumes as these notes are distributed. As this wave of enthusiasm builds, the supplier is arrested, bringing the thread to an end.

Now about the context, the forum is a social space: Benjamin enjoys support from thread participants who advise on fine tuning note design and use. Benjamin had a number of buyers who were very positive about the product. As problems emerged they were accused of being sock puppet accounts. These acolytes proposed that if people were finding problems getting the notes accepted they were doing it wrong. They were following the wrong strategy, or were inherently suspicious individuals who invited greater scrutiny. Benjamin endorses these readings. Although one can never be sure, it did appear that these were genuine accounts who had made purchases through the system. Tell us why we now need to know about crime scripts: The business logic required a supporting chorus of satisfied buyers who could validate the quality of the notes and how they were used, in the form of a shared crime script.

Using the crime script

Start with a basic taxonomy: Participants had various roles: structuring, supporting, guiding, questioning, and various degrees of investment in Benjamin’s success. Some were highly critical of the entire process and said that passing of fake currency was only good for people who could not make it as drug dealers. Others saw their role as validating the genuineness of Benjamin’s efforts. One user, thisoldman, became critical in guiding buyers through the crime script, and users reported success with guidance from them. Thisoldman offered a guide for purchase to passing notes which could be bought through the site. They passed out tips on how to improve the passability of the notes by altering their appearance and feel.

The two separate scripts for Benjamin and their customers are set out side by side in Table 1. There was more information on the customers’ script as they participated much more in the discussion which involved troubleshooting their use of the notes. I have included both as they both centre around the forum in different ways. The forum was crucial to both scripts in different ways.

Showing there is more than a technical function/aptitude needed: From the point of view of Benjamin, creating a plausible cryptomarket identity was the first technical step. Then they needed to satisfy two reputational requirements. They needed to be in good standing with their supplier in order to secure a large enough order of notes to make redistribution profitable, and to appear both plausible and reliable to the users of the crytpomarket. Buyers were taking a risk buying the notes as they had little recourse if they turned out to be unusable. Throughout the process Benjamin had to calibrate their expectations of what they have, do the technical work of processing and sending orders, review users experience in the forum, send feedback to the supplier and cash out. Engagement with the forum was needed to manage the customer base and keep them involved:

My supplier has just informed me that a rather LARGE shipment is in DHL processing now, and should be coming out of customs shortly. Keep your fingers crossed people!”,,

A notable aspect of this was Benjamin’s willingness to expose their own process. A key instrumental precondition was prepping and batching notes for distribution and Benjamin wrote often about the process of preparing the notes, showing how the process might go wrong and acknowledging the uncertanties:

It means that MrMouse and I among other retailers are having to treat notes ourselves with makeshift methods from the boss, and we aren’t artists like Willy, so we struggle. We don’t have access to the chemicals that Willy does on his end for proper treatment. We get the job done (as in your notes will definitely pass the pen test), but recouping the pure authentic feel has been a challenge.

Closing the feedback loop with the supplier was necessary to continue the script. Benjamin had to give feedback to Willy.Clock and inform the forum of how the notes were changing in response.

Benjamin and some key contributors maintained a modus operandi document, effectively their own literal crime script, to guide users through the process. The document involved ensuring users did not try too high and invite suspicion, for example, by buying a one dollar item with a one hundred dollar note.

Showing how the findings are structured: The relationship between Benjamin and their buyers was one where Benjamin acted as an avatar for the notes. From the point of view of the user the central elements of the process were identifying a point to swap out fake notes for real ones, turn the counterfeit into goods that can be used or returned for cash or otherwise realise real money from the fake notes.  That could involve working with an insider at a bank or a retail outlet where there would be considerable cash flow. Most contributors however used them at retail level by selecting a plausible target and time of day to buy small value items with a large note. Users selected targets according to their judgment on whether the note would be accepted. Some split targets by denomination, using $20s and $50s in busy outlets, or buying more $100s when they were confident the note quality and the target merited it. In their discussion the buyers mentioned how they slipped the counterfeits into the supply chain. Their varied tactics were aimed at laundering bad notes into good. Buying a small value item with $50 or $100 notes and obtaining change would do that. However there was a risk that cashiers would be more likely to scrutinise or refuse large value notes for small value items. Another route to actualisation was buying easily cashable tokens such as money cards.

A labour structure was in evidence in some cases. Most buyers used the notes as individuals. One buyer claimed to be running a larger operation with a team who would spend the notes. There was a sense that these were not major players and would be buying small amounts to use in ways that would not attract attention.

They discussed various failures and how to exit the scene after notes were rejected. None reported the police being called in response to an attempt to use fake notes.

Give a feel for the process: A skill promoted was the ability to work the notes into a consistent product, using the inevitably variable supply provided by Benjamin to produce something consistently workable:

My only issue now is that this batch was different then the last one, not because of quality but because Ink clearly did something wrong to the paper, personally I shut the fuck up and just fixed it myself by putting them in water like I said before, but some people just think they should get supernotes in the mail and not have to touch anything because they are really petty customers, so in your best interest Ink we think you should fix

Linking both ends together: Material skills were in evidence. Working the notes showed how the physical qualities of the notes were seen as features that had to be enacted in practice, through a combination of the ability of the buyer to work the notes into plausible currency, select the right target and approach in the right way. The combination of technique and technology came together to enact the counterfeit currency as a technology applied to a specific situation. In that sense the currency is only enacted in place.

Discussion

Remind the reader of the context: Distribution of counterfeit currency in this way is an example of a hybrid crime combining online distribution of the product and offline implementation of the crime, actually using the notes in a fraudulent way. The script required understanding the meta-criminal context in which Benjamin and the users operated. Benjamin was a secondary vendor for a primary note producer. Therefore they had to manage both their supply and manage expectations within the darknet community about the effectiveness of the notes. Benjamin’s second stage role meant they could palm off some of the responsibility for poor quality product onto the supplier but still needed to maintain a reasonably high hit rate among their customers. It was vital in order to keep selling the notes that users reported success with them. This is not an unusual element of digital crime. Some organisations have guides and helplines for both associates and victims in order to ensure the script goes smoothly, allowing for negation between victim and offender (Hernandez-Castro, Cartwright, and Stepanova 2017). A further analysis is invited which treats the counterfeit notes as part of a criminal assemblage. In this perspective the discourse around it, the production and distribution system, is part of a set of practices that produce the product as a workable entity.

Fit it into the literature: Though cryptomarkets focus on drug distribution some attempt to branch out into sales of weapons, counterfeit cigarettes and other goods such as counterfeit currency. This example shows that the system can be adapted so that the cryptomarket takes over the last mile of counterfeit distribution, and also the problems adapting the cryptomarket verification and quality control systems to a very different product. The community had great difficulty verifying the quality of the notes and had a single point of failure in the person of Benjamin, making it much less resilient than the section of the cryptomarket dealing in illicit drugs.

Size the issue: Overall the counterfeit trade in the cryptomarkets is fragile compared to the drug trade, as many participants recognised in their discussions. Another reason for the lack of resilience was the limited profit to be gained. Notes sell for 50% of face value. Therefore most profit is made in the production/distribution phases. When users take into account risk and the expense of crime commission the likely profit is much less than the theoretical profit of using counterfeit notes. Profits are further reduced if the user needs to employ others and share profits as part of their business model.

Talking about limits shows how the findings can be adapted in other contexts: The context limits some inferences that can be drawn. Participants do not disclose their country of operation. The darknet can be accessed from many countries, though it is difficult to access it from China. Data show most darknet use takes place in European, North America and Australia and the language/tone of the participants indicate they are based in the USA. References to the Federal Reserve and the fact they are using dollars in retail transactions indicates they are American. What is missing? There are a number of dark players in the cryptomarkets. The administrators and moderators govern who gets to create an account. They can ban accounts though a persistent hostile user can easily recreate another. Benjamin’s crime script is oriented towards his or her actions in the forum and there is a missing part to it, their relationship with their supplier.

What’s new/different? The cryptomarket provides a space for discussion and a hub for distribution.  The counterfeit vendors/users employ an adaptable crime script. There is more variation in the buyers’ script. Benjamin’s script is constrained by the quality of the product available and the willingness of the buyers to pay for and use it. To an extent the group as a whole worked on developing their crime script through comparing different experiences with using the notes, their opinions on their technical qualities, and advice about how to successfully use them without being detected. In this way what mattered to them became apparent. The technical qualities of the notes were a means to an end: their ability to use them successfully and then use the knowledge gained to buy more. Successful repeat use was vital in order to make any kind of return, which was why consistent supply was so important to them. New context: insertion of market forum into crime script development and adaption. Discussion forums are critical in criminal evolution and innovation and we can also include other media such as Telegram channels in this. Users hybridise different modes to produce a workable modus operandi.

Why technology matters in one sense: The forum has certain technological affordances that matter. It is an example of a self-generated hierarchy. Why technology matters in another sense, and why we need to modify what we understand by crimetech: the notes have to be worked in different stages to make them plausible to different audiences, from the buyer to the target. That goes from batching to distribution, prepared for use and then distributed. Both Benjamin and the buyers treated the notes they received. Crime is embodied as craft work, recognising the personal, emotional labour that has to be involved in crime commission.

Finesse existing theory: The organisational context and the character of the criminal relationship is quite limited as Bejnamin has no control over the buyers so this relationship is voluntary. In comparison money mules are sometimes coerced through threats or debt relationships [ref]. The character of the crime is one of mutual exchange. It can be understood in terms of an dapted rational choice theory, but with added recognition of positionality/identity as motivating factors, materiality. Both vendor and buyer morally orient themselves to each other and the crime itself. ‘Rational’ is often drawn narrowly in terms of interests and should include the person’s identification of their own moral positioning in relation to the criminal activity, their motivation.

What can I infer? Both Ink and the buyers engage in innovation and fine tuning of their crime scripts. For Ink, reputation management and playing the role of the vendor willing to learn and respond to their critics is a key part of maintaining their status. For the buyers, they discuss how to successfully make use of the currency, avoid incurring legal liability while adapting to potential surveillance conditions.

Conclusion

What are the consequences of this paper (and I’d better rethink the title now): I have argued that understanding the crime script in this context is something supported by the community as a social organization and also as a material structure enacted through craft practices. As a consequence, intervention might consider taking place at the level of craft labour. There is a great degree of tacit knowledge involved in criminal enterprises. Crime script analysis tends to focus on the technical steps which foregrounds a rational choice approach when it comes to attacking the incentive structure. This analysis shows how reputation and plausibility are crucial elements at different stages, and the labour needed to achieve them.

Acknowledgements

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

References

Bank of England. 2022. ‘Counterfeit Banknotes’. Retrieved 7 June 2022 (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/counterfeit-banknotes).

Barratt, Monica J., and Judith Aldridge. 2016. ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Drug Cryptomarkets* (*but Were Afraid to Ask)’. International Journal of Drug Policy 35:1–6. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.07.005.

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. 2021. The Fed – Money Stock Measures – H.6 Release – December 28, 2021. Washington, D.C.: The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington DC.

Chainey, Spencer P., and Arantza Alonso Berbotto. 2021. ‘A Structured Methodical Process for Populating a Crime Script of Organized Crime Activity Using OSINT’. Trends in Organized Crime. doi: 10.1007/s12117-021-09428-9.

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Childs, Andrew, Ross Coomber, Melissa Bull, and Monica J. Barratt. 2020. ‘Evolving and Diversifying Selling Practices on Drug Cryptomarkets: An Exploration of Off-Platform “Direct Dealing”’. Journal of Drug Issues 50(2):173–90. doi: 10.1177/0022042619897425.

Dehghanniri, Hashem, and Hervé Borrion. 2016. ‘Toward a More Structured Crime Scripting Method’. Pp. 94–97 in 2016 IEEE 24th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW).

Dittus, Martin, Joss Wright, and Mark Graham. 2017. ‘Platform Criminalism: The “Last-Mile” Geography of the Darknet Market Supply Chain’. Pp. 277–86 in WWW ’18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference. Geneva: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

European Central Bank. 2021. ‘Euro Banknote Counterfeiting at Historically Low Level in 2020’.

Felson, Marcus. 2006. ‘THE ECOSYSTEM FOR ORGANIZED CRIME’. P. 20 in HEUNI 25th Anniversary Lecture. Helsinki.

Felson, Marcus. 2009. ‘The Natural History of Extended Co-Offending’. Trends in Organized Crime 12(2):159–65. doi: 10.1007/s12117-008-9056-7.

Hayward, Keith. 2007. ‘Situational Crime Prevention and Its Discontents: Rational Choice Theory versus the “Culture of Now”’. Social Policy & Administration 41(3):232–50. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9515.2007.00550.x.

Hernandez-Castro, Julio, Edward Cartwright, and Anna Stepanova. 2017. ‘Economic Analysis of Ransomware’. ArXiv:1703.06660 [Cs].

Holt, Thomas J., and Jin R. Lee. 2020. ‘A Crime Script Analysis of Counterfeit Identity Document Procurement Online’. Deviant Behavior 1–18. doi: 10.1080/01639625.2020.1825915.

Judson, Ruth, and Richard Porter. 2003. Estimating the Worldwide Volume of Counterfeit U.S. Currency: Data and Extrapolation. Washington, D.C.: Division of Monetary Affairs Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

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Lemon, Alaina. 1998. ‘“Your Eyes Are Green like Dollars”: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia’. Cultural Anthropology 13(1):22–55. doi: 10.1525/can.1998.13.1.22.

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Van Nguyen, Trong. 2021. ‘The Modus Operandi of Transnational Computer Fraud: A Crime Script Analysis in Vietnam’. Trends in Organized Crime 1–22. doi: 10.1007/s12117-021-09422-1.

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A research review is a summary, evaluation and critique of a book or other work, like a report or a collection of research articles.  Its purpose is to comment on the state of knowledge on a topic and/or to evaluate a particular theory or contribution. The first task you have is to define what it is you are looking at. A book in academic terms is a very different text than a report. They are produced for different aims and audiences. A book review is the most common format, and that is why I am leading with that.

Writing a book review

A book review is your take on the book’s contribution. It shows how the book fits into an existing narrative or debate, stakes out new ground, and moves our understanding forward. There are two approaches you can take: the first a conventional review largely contained within the territory the book itself stakes out. The second is a review essay which sets the book in a wider context.

Each approach draws on similar questions, which I have set out below. Each question asks you to assess the book’s contribution to the theoretical or research problem it is part of. Depending on your approach the balance will change between them. For example, if you were reviewing the memoir Spare you would not just summarise what it says but ask what it tells you about monarchy, and about how insiders write about it. How is the book’s perspective both enhanced and limited by that? What effect does it have? How does it shape our public discourse about monarchy in general and the British royal family in particular? You would also want to assess how it achieves its aims. Is the writing convincing? Does it reveal more about the author than he intended? How does it fit into a particular idiom? A book is always part of a bigger project or discourse, is more than itself.

How do you start a book review? Reading the book might be a good way to go. But a book is very big. You want to begin with a reading template, a set of keywords or concepts you will look for in the book. Identify themes you will look out for, keywords that trigger your interest. As you read, note points you want to return to to clarify or check against later claims. If the book sets out hypotheses early on, then see that they are met later on. Develop a reading template, a plan of points to look for in the book. For example,  for the book Rahman M (2019) Homicide and Organised Crime: Ethnographic Narratives of Serious Violence in the Criminal Underworld I have prompted you to look for what it has to say about masculinity and habitus, so look for where he discusses those themes, note down both what he has to say and how he says it. Note the contexts he refers to and the kinds of masculinity and habitus in evidence. You can show how these concepts connect to each other. How might different ideas of masculinity relate to each other and to violence?

Another template you could use is to categorise the types of narrative the book uses. Some books are very narrative driven, and others let the argument flow through the evidence. In an academic book not all the content has the same purpose. Some of the writing establishes the authors’ bona fides, while other sections demonstrate and elaborate on their argument. The questions I have set are to help you do this, to give you points to look for throughout.

When writing it, ensure you cover these points:

• Start out with a bit about the author or authors

Say who they are. Look at their Google Scholar profile. Have they written other books or papers on this topic? Are they known for taking a certain angle? Do they belong to a theoretical school that shapes what they say? Often they will say this in the introduction.

If you are taking the book review essay approach you will want to highlight the problem or question the book tackles more than what the book itself claims.

• Summarise the book.

A book is written with a purpose so start by stating what that is. What are its aims and agenda? What is it trying to say? What is it aiming to do? What problem does it want to solve? What evidence is it producing, if any? Some books aim to be theoretical or thought leader contributions. They want to shape the debate on this topic and set an agenda. They say what should be. Others are reporting on research projects and so are more like a statement of what is, and what matters. How is the book structured? Depending on how you want to write the review, you might spend more or less on this part.

• Situate the book.

Each book is part of a bigger conversation happening in its field. Usually you will know this because it will tell you a lot. What kinds of debates is it influence, what problems is it addressing? Find who else has intervened in this debate and from what perspectives. Is the author arguing against them? Books usually comment a lot on existing research and you might want to say how effectively they have done that.

• Evaluate the book.

Say what you liked about it. How did you feel while reading it? What does it contribute, what are its strengths and weakness. Does it meet the challenges it sets? Look at how it gathers and uses evidence. Are there limits there? Think of common strengths – a wide selection of cases and a desire to look for evidential counterpoints shows a willingness to disagree and reflect. It makes for a more resilient set of findings. Limited case selection might indicate limits to the argument. Make a critical reading of the text. Authors often use terms inconsistently, to mean different things at different times, which can make the meaning hard to pin down, but illuminating.

For instance, a book that examines masculinity and crime: does it define masculinity in terms you are convinced by? Is it consistent? Does it understand how masculinity evolves sociologically? How is the term applied in relation to the empirical evidence it uses? Let us say the study is looking for manifestations of masculinity, are you convinced by how it does that? Use other framings you have come across in the course. If discussing organised crime, does it rely on police definitions of what organised crime is? Outline the limits of doing that.

Say what concepts are being used incidentally but need to be thought through. Gangs is one we see often in the research. The concept has a lot of assumptions build in as to what gangs are, who belongs to them and how they function. The book index is useful here.

How does the author know what they claim to. What sources of evidence are being used and how should they be evaluated? What are the limits of Rahman’s ‘dashcam ethnography’ for example?

Was there anything you did not like? Did you feel the book addressed you well as a reader? Is there anything missing from its agenda or approach?

When reading the book be guided by your response to it. You will respond to any academic text intellectually and emotionally, and in my view we cannot separate those elements. How you read the book matters as much as what it says, and what it says to you matters as much as what it says to the topic of criminology or whatever it might be. Your response is a valid good guide to what it is saying – are there parts that are intriguing, or recognisable, or captivating, or alienating? Did anything make you laugh? Always say why that was.

• Look ahead

A good way to end is to suggest where we might go from here. Is it worth pursuing the agenda they lay out and what might be needed to do that?

Reviewing a report

Reviewing a report such as a document published by Europol is different from a book because of the way in which it is written and the purpose for which it is written. A report like one of Europol’s threat assessments serves several functions. It is a statement of the organisation’s purpose and a justification for its existence and strategy. In the case of Europol it is a political document, in the sense that it seeks to influence the aims and strategy of members. It is a case for action. Reports can also serve other functions. A report on past investigations might say ‘this is how things should be done. This is the best way of doing them.’ It might explicitly identify problems to be fixed.

A report is an institutional document, unlike a book, which is a personal document. Therefore, when reviewing a report, you would want to say why it was being written, and for what purpose. What function of the institution is being served by this report? In one sense, a report is also saying something about what the institution is as well as what the problem. In one sense, a report is also saying something about what the institution is as well as what the problem or challenge is. If you know the work of if you know the work of Weber on bureaucracies and how they act you will be very familiar with this idea. It is not too conspiratorial to assess that anything produced by bureaucracy is in some way going to be justifying the bureaucracy’s existence or purpose.

That does not mean it is without value. It does mean that there are going to be other takes on the issue which might might not be represented in the report. Do you have a way of finding those out or representing them? Also, consider the audience. A report like those produced by Europol is not going to spend a lot of time discussing the produced by Europol is not going to spend a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of different definitions of organised crime. It will say a lot more about it is it is and what we should be worried about.

You will find that reports present evidence in a very different way to an academic book or article. Academics talk a lot about how we arrived at our conclusions, reports are focused much more on what the conclusions are. Academics should present the evidence in a way that allows you to reach your own conclusions. Reports often do not do that. You can see that at work in reports by activist groups which are often highly selective and need to be read with a critical eye.

You know that bit at the end of your dissertation or research paper where you suggest what could be done next, and which is always the last thing everyone writes and which you give less thought to than a status update on Insta? You are doing it wrong. Typically these sections are either written in Fantasy Project style, imagining some other study that is not going to happen, or Fill in the Blanks, suggesting some tweaks to sampling or doing more of what you had done. Stop doing that. Nobody cares. Do not waste space imagining some new project. You will never do it. Stop pretending you will ever go back and fix the project that is now in the rear view mirror.

Instead, make some plans that are achievable. Identify other datasets that yours can be linked to. This gives you opportunities for further writing, looking at how your data correlates to another context. The aim is to show how your findings could work with others and how they feed into a macro context which meshes with data, theory and findings from other projects. Ask how your data works with other data types. How would your hypothesis play out in other contexts. How consistent would it be in other cases. How should it be tested against new data.

As an example, we have sorted cybercrime groupings on two dimensions, closed/open in terms of how porous their external boundaries are, and status driven/pecuniary in terms of their motive and business model. A Russian cybercrime grouping is closed and pecuniary within limits. It acts in the interests of the Russian state at times, seeking political legitimacy and in group status. Where might cybercrime groups yet to be brought into being sit and why? Would identity or language based groupings cluster at one end or another? Could it be applied to cases in the UNODC Sherloc database? What new hypotheses could be generated? What might we expect of Islamist or right wing terrorism, or the relationship between cyberwar and state conflict? One advantage is that you can take risks within the bounds of plausibility. The further work should be a genuine map ahead for you which takes you to new places, so think in terms of the possibilities it offers for new thinking and collaboration.

If you did not have imposter syndrome you would basically be living in your parents’ attic right now (apologies if you are in fact living there right now. I’m sure it’s nice). You cannot get rid of imposter syndrome but you can feel better about it and use some elements of it as a positive signal. When it becomes crippling then it is a real problem so we should knock heads together to avoid that. Just do not feel that having it means you are doing something wrong. I can’t even do imposter syndrome right!

Imposter syndrome is the pervasive sense of not being who other people think you are. In academia it manifests as a feeling that while everyone else arrived where they are by being exceptional, you are only exceptional in a bad sense and are here because of some vast system error which let the likes of you through. Do not worry though, as pretty soon someone will notice and you will be found out, and then – no more imposter syndrome, back to the attic with you.

Here are its key elements:

1. I don’t belong here/should not be here. Everyone else knows it but is too polite/busy to say.
2. Everyone else knows what they are doing. Everything I say/do is wrong or embarrassing.
3. I have an impossible mountain to climb and everything I have achieved to date is worthless.

I constantly felt the need to blurt out ‘don’t you see that I am not one of you’ for years. There are a few reasons I would like to rehabilitate imposter syndrome a little bit as I think some aspects of it are distorted features of a positive signal that we cannot live without.

Number one, the feeling of not belonging can be a good signal about where you are in terms of the social order. Maybe it tells you something about where you are and the biases that you are feeling. It can mean you have experienced a change in status (a good thing) but this comes with anomie. It can also mean something about where you are. When you have someone make you feel like you do not belong that tells you quite a bit about the institution you are in. Maybe it is not quite what it pretends to be. The hard bit of imposter syndrome is the sense of powerlessness. The institution is class ridden and chews people up because it is flawed. Generally though not belonging is good – it means you are taking on challenges and living through them.

The sense that everyone else knows what they are doing might be because you have cleverly surrounded yourself with people who you can learn from. The best way of improving and pushing yourself is by being in an environment with people who are a bit more advanced than you are. It is the main advice runners get. Run with people who are a little faster than you. That is all you are doing. Being with people  who have abilities you do not is the way. Also, ‘clever’ people who make others feel small are not that clever.

Having an impossible task ahead and not being able to rely on past achievements means you challenge yourself and are driven forward all the time. Most of our ideas end up being discarded/look like washed out filler after a while because otherwise we would just do nothing forever. Artists do not paint the same paintings/compose the same orchestral works that they did when they were starting out, but they can take from early experience the seeds of something greater.

This post might read as being quite breezy, as only someone who has got past all of that could write it. Often the advice we give new colleagues and research students about imposter syndrome is a bit too much on the side of ‘everyone feels that’ which I suspect is not true, and also does not get to the heart of what it is and why it is experienced. If we see it as something deep within the human condition, but also something that might be a signal that things are working as they should, then it might be experienced more productively.

Ontology (‘what is’) is a topic students often have difficulty grappling with in their work. It tends to end up being a set of buzzwords that people lay fealty to (interpretivist! Social constructionist!) and generalist statements about society being ever changing and such. It should be a set of thinking tools that help you work through the research problem you are examining.

Plus it’s a great way to annoy and get the drop on existing researchers, which is what you should be doing. That is why when academics write we spend a lot of time saying what we mean by our topic, for example, I study illicit markets. What is a market, you rightly ask? It turns out to be contested and not at all ‘just what looks like one, numb numb’. Think of epistemology as the researcher’s shield against being wrong, which we really hate. This matters because there are real world consequences of claims about knowledge and how reliable and consistent it is, which you will see later. We need to know research theory works because we must grasp the underlying reality we report on and what matters about it. For example, we have plenty of statistical data about financial inequality, but when we ask people what matters to them they often refer to localized comparison with others in similar circumstances. What matters more when people vote?

In terms of epistemology, a recent case shows why it matters and how complex it is. The question being asked is how you show intention in order to prove fraud about scientific claims. Elizabeth Holmes’ company Theranos claimed to have a simple device that could test blood using a pinprick – radically better than existing systems that use centralized labs and larger blood samples. It was a complete impossibility for various immutable biological reasons (you cannot sample the ocean with a bucket). Nonetheless the company topped out at a multi-billion valuation before reality took an interest, resulting in an effect rather like that when Wile-E-Coyote notices he has walked off a cliff. Holmes argued that her claims were just the kind of salesmanship we see all the time. From a sociological standpoint we would ask some other questions beyond her legal culpability. For example, how the culture of Silicon Valley set the scene for Theranos’ failure, a culture that focuses on disruption, is scornful of existing, tacit understanding, and thinks that if you throw enough data at a problem you will solve it. Is this capitalism gone rogue or working much as intended? How is this kind of behaviour made normal? We look on crime as normal, as produced by the setting, not as exceptional and pathological.

So the questions we ask are not just ‘is such and such claim true or false’, but about what the conditions for truth and falsehood are. For example: Take the question ‘Why do women often suffer from hysteria’, occasionally asked back when hysteria was a thing largely male doctors attributed to women. The answer was, because they have wombs, duh. A more epistemologically nuanced question becomes ‘why are women being diagnosed with hysteria a lot?’ shifting the focus to the people doing the categorising, then ‘What is it about the definition of hysteria that means it is applied to typically female experiences’? And ‘Is the label being used to control women? What does that say about society’? Medicine is a great study because it tussles with these entities all the time: addiction, mental illness, physical typologies, all are malleable, moving targets with a large helping of cultural assumptions behind them. Other problems stem from flawed cultural epistemologies. One is the claimed CSI effect in juries. Because of shows like CSI it is alleged that juries in criminal trials expect an unrealistic degree of certainty from forensic science, which is never there, and treat doubt as equivalent to failure of the science. So there are problems of producing certainty where there is none, which is a big problem in public policy, and the reverse, turning reasonable uncertainty into unreasonable doubt.

This is all about avoiding fallacies in reasoning, so we can point at those others make and laugh. Fallacies come in leaps of logic. One I hear a lot is ‘People with racist views voted for Brexit ergo Brexit happened because of racism’. The second assertion is not proved by the first. Any sociological research sets up a chain of logic and we need to be sure each link in the chain is solid. We need to be clear about what we do not know, what is not certain, before starting to claim what is.

Your basic cheat sheet is:

Ontology asks what its nature is: the cosmology of the real. For Erving Goffman, the nature of the self is as a dramaturgical actor. We want a handle on what social reality consists of, what forms and types does it contain, how do they behave towards each other.

Epistemology asks what the nature of knowledge is, how can these forms be known about, how it is made meaningful. So it is both about how we assess it and communicate it. The hierarchy is a bit wrong, really epistemology comes first – how did we start with an idea of human/nature split in the first place without an epistemological stance on it that formed our ontology.

Methodology is the framework or strategy to do the work. Methodology shapes our everyday lives. A quantifying app tells us: humans can be compared, and are in competition even if just with ourselves/our bodies. Tells us our bodies are a resource over which we have power. University rankings. The creation of a hierarchy and certainty. So epistemology has real, direct effects on the world. We can then question our ontological understanding, like the background assumption that only humans make decisions/are selves. Algorithms say different.

Finally we get to what we want to look for in our methods, our techniques. Where does this reality appear? Is it where you think? Would I know more about drug policy from interviewing the Scot gov drug minister, or from hanging out in a drug consumption service?

We can divide up methodological types based on the qualities of the data produced: Qualitative/quantitative/big data/social network analysis are common typologies. But we can also divide them up by purpose:  There are trend approaches, where statistics are useful. Social change, where biographical or oral history is helpful. Archeological methods that sift and uncover the hidden history of an entity. Embedded methods like ethnography. We can also slice our techniques up by their relation to the world. For example, Geertz approaches culture as a symbolic text, while Levi-Strauss sees it as functional, relational system, abstract from the meanings given by people doing it.

In order to get closer to the language we should use, Llet us name different types of approach through the controversies around them. Ontology has two aspects. First, it is the set of ground truths – basic accepted reality claims – that you take as elemental to your study which limit how you can study it. Second it is a set of disputes about the nature of social reality and evidence about it which both affect your research and that can be studied as part of it.

• To illustrate both, here are some competing ontological statements:

1. What we call society is just the aggregated outcome of individual interaction. It has no independent reality.
2. Lived experience gives a unique and unchallengeable insight into questions of power and politics.
3. IQ shapes individual destiny

These are framed in a straw man style so we can have an argument. Each statement claims a ground truth about an element of social life which is fundamental to it. Each is structured something like ‘before we consider anything, we have to consider this’. Before talking about education outcomes, we have to consider that children enter the education system with a set of capacities measured by IQ, which shape outcomes far down the line. Before examining how people group themselves into functioning units we need to see how they create boundaries through interaction. Before considering experience we must understand subject position.

• How are research problems produced from these statements? Consider also what might falsify each of these statements. For example, if you studied intersectionality and found that class position was dominant. Or that sex mattered in a way that was fundamentally different from other identity categories. What obdurate facts are lurking in the wings waiting to derail things?

Our task is to understand when these claims are 1. Testable 2. Compatible or mutually incommensurable, on the way to asking 3. Are they true. People often leap ahead to point 3 based on whether they like them or not. We have to roll the chain of logic back a bit and start with what each claim says about human nature, and human agency. This shades into the politics of research, because these questions are innately politically charged ie liable to really piss someone off.

In terms of your own topic, there are questions to ask yourself:

1. What tangible entities shape human life but are independent of it?
2. How do human-made categories map onto naturally occurring taxonomies?
3. What purpose do cultural/social categories serve?
4. What questions can be answered empirically?
5. Are there something like natural laws in social life?

The process should be creative. For example, let us examine gender symbolism in clothing. Take a near example: is a kilt a skirt? Why not? Does it depend on who is wearing it? We thus generate a flow of questions to produce insight. We find there is not an inherent ‘kiltiness’ to the object, its kilt-ness is a combination of symbolism and context. We apply that to other naturally occurring categories so that every question is theory dependent. There is no biological basis for the category of illicit drugs that includes heroin but excludes alcohol, but that category matters. Another trick case in point is how we train machines to recognise human categories like spam email. You need to agree what spam is first of all which is trickier than it first seems.

Think of this slide as a map for your research logic, which you can do to trace your path through some of these questions. Be aware of what we mean by specific terms. For example ‘laws’ means something like the natural laws classical science studies (very different from for example quantum physics). We come across this all the time in computer science. For example, ‘King’ or ‘Prince’ occur a lot with words signifying power and status, but ‘Queen’ and ‘Princess’ not so. Is it just a question of producing more accurate knowledge? For example, a lot of medical diagnosis derives from limited datasets that often exclude women – see the symptom galaxy for hear disease, drug dependence, and autism. So we miss things. Or over include people in developing countries where lots of pharmaceuticals are tested. So is solving that problem just a matter of adding more data (positivism) or is there something more fundamental amiss (critical realism)? You can link that to your threat model. In each paradigm we model threat differently. In the case of the drug fentanyl, there are objective dangers due to its material qualities, users approach it in terms of risk positioning, and we can point to supply chain harms produced as a result of dealer incentives in the illicit market. Here is a good example of how harms are produced and then localsed through a system of global incentive structures.

Critical realism sets out a distinction between empirical (observable) actual (events generating observed phenomena)  and real (causal mechanisms, structures) Epistemology matters because of the kind of questions we CAN ask within its terms e.g ‘Is this claim true?’ ‘Does x affect Y’ ‘What matters about Z’ In my work I use all of these paradigms. My research projects ask did COVID restrictions shift people from social supply to commercial drug dealing? (yes, a bit). Does the digital drug market change what drugs are? Yes, it makes them into commodities and users into rational consumers.

This next slide is a map through some different concepts as they appear in each paradigm. It matters because people use the same term to mean different things and different terms for the same thing. Some categories are powerful over us and some less so. Some are salient in specific contexts only. Eg being a ‘British citizen’ is not the same as ‘Being/feeling British’.

• This and previous slides should be a cheat sheet to help you critique existing research and theory in these terms

Really we are talking about levels of analysis. For example: I know that there is such a thing as organized cybercrime, which causes harm – I can measure that a bit. I also know that some people are criminalized for white hat hacking activities, and that groups might appear organized without being organized, and that harm is very variable and unevenly distributed. What I’d want to know is the type of society that permits some harms and suppresses others.

The best way to understand ontology as a concept is through tracking disagreements in your field. Here is one: at the moment medical startups are seeking to develop psychedelic treatments that do not have psychedelic effects. This is part of legitimating the treatment as a medicine. But many people in the psychedelic community do not see the positive effects as separable from the psychedelic experience and see this is a questionable, somewhat hostile move. It involves giving the psychedelic qualities that we resist: consistency of effect, predictability. In the view of psychedelic culture this makes it ‘not a psychedelic’. Which is about the unifying of consciousness and the creation of insight about self and the world.

The same disagreement played out over cannabis’ analgesic properties. Can you produce a drug that separates out its intoxicant effect? Is it the same drug, and the same experience? These are ontological questions. Questions about what the object is, fundamentally.

• This takes us from ontology to epistemology, which asks where knowledge about the world derives its authority from. In the one case, the source of authority is political expediency. In other places it is traditional authority, or ‘it’s aye been that way’. The quality these have is there is something in it that refuses to be questioned. Guess what our job is? To be the annoying person who won’t stop asking ‘but why though’.
• The case is based on the debate around this article:  Doleac JL and Mukherjee A (2021) The Effects of Naloxone Access Laws on Opioid Abuse, Mortality, and Crime. The Journal of Law and Economics 65(2): 211–238. DOI: 1086/719588. and insight from Stevens A (2020) Critical realism and the ‘ontological politics of drug policy.’ International Journal of Drug Policy: 102723. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102723.

Controversies come into view when we discuss cause – often reduced to ‘spooky action at a distance’ which we want to avoid. Examples of that are: video game violence causes real world violence (how exactly Civilization VI does that I don’t know). You do not hear much about that complaint now video games are ubiquitous. Instead the ‘threat’ has shifted to online communities of incels and the alt-right.

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist used to counter overdose. A potential life saving medication. In the US a ‘naloxone in every medicine cabinet’ approach has been followed to ensure heroin and other opiate users have immediate access. Doleac and Mukherjee say, hold on. They examine the effects of universal access policies in terms of moral hazard, risk adaption. The theory is that for example cars that feel safe make people drive in a more dangerous way. They use a natural experiment of US state level policies. They make relevant points: naloxone is not a magic bullet, such things do not exist in this field. Any change induces a change in behaviour. Drug users are risk aware and have agency, are rational choice users. The study was criticised for, as Stevens sets out, problems of shallow ‘cause’, absence of theory, assumption about objective entities interacting without meaning. For example, rationality is bounded by circumstance so we cannot reduce choices to rational order preferences. The correlation Doleac and Mukherjee  demonstrate does not prove moral hazard at work. One would need to look closely at users’ accounts of their motives in context in order to get closer to the ‘real’, the underlying structures and mechanisms. Moral hazard remains unproven. Get ontology wrong and people might die. No pressure.

If you would like to learn more yourself, here is an exercise to do:  read Palmieri, M., Cataldi, S., Martire, F., & Iorio, G., (2021). Challenges for creating a transnational index from secondary sources: The world love index in the making. In SAGE Research Methods Cases Part 1. SAGE Publications, Ltd., https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529762037

• Ask yourself the following questions:
• What does GDP measure, and why are people critical of it?
• Can we really ‘measure’ love as proposed?
• What other measurements have you come across that might matter to us? For example, you might see life expectancy, or average incomes, or measures of pollution, or other claims about some aspect of reality which are based on social research.
• What are the social and political consequences of selecting different measurements of aspects of social and economic life?

‘The cherry tree appears to be in a cut down situation’ is not a good sentence construction if the reality is ‘I cut down the cherry tree’. The former construction is common in risk adverse modern life. Acknowledge just enough of the situation while obfuscating all direction, cause, effect and attribution. It also seeps into theory, where writers construct vast linguistic edifices in order to avoid saying why observable phenomena exist as they do. When people avoid agent focused language they are often up to something, obfuscating some uncomfortable cause or preferring not to attribute it. Sometimes there are more benign motives. Causality is complex and we should not uselessly reduce everything to a single cause when it is not sensible to do so. But we can recognise multi-causality and uncertainty while still allowing that events are happening because they were initiated, if not necessarily by a human. We can also examine the contradictions and paradoxes in claims about agency – for example, people dependent on drugs or alcohol are characterised as both lacking agency but also told to use willpower to overcome addiction (Brookfield et al., 2022). It is no simple thing either personally or in abstract terms. The reverse is a problem too. Massive datasets and statistical regression allow us to see causes everywhere.

Agent focused language is satisfying because it gives direction to the writing. But is it fundamentally untrue? The Pharaoh Khufu built the Great Pyramid is meaningful shorthand, but not literally true. He caused it to be built. He initiated its construction. He brought it into being. It combines several elements that are not the same. An awareness of cause, recognition that the world is shaped by human action within constraints, and that humans have this unique way of viewing their own affairs. That last point is one where we need to be careful. Some societies go all-in on this and it is not surprising to learn that our market-focused societies put a very specific kind of human self-maximising agency to the centre. There are other kinds. A religious person who sees themselves as enacting God’s will is no less an agent. It is also damaging to not recognise how a sense of loss of control affects humans in aggregate. If we look at the Brexit vote, sociologists tried every trick in the book to pretend it was something it was not. We were told it was due to misinformation, or imperial nostalgia, or flat out racism. All the opinion polling then and since shows it was about what people said it was about: taking back control.

We should also be sensitised to the different causal claims about the world. The debate about Doleac and Muhkerjee’s (2022) paper on the effect of naloxone access policy. Naloxone is given out to limit the effects of overdose. It should be a lifesaver. The paper examines whether there is a risk compensation effect, in that users are more likely to engage in risky behaviour when there is a perception of a safety net. Partly it received such a response because its claims were put so forthrightly, which is good. Better to have clear lines. Stevens (2020) criticises the concept of cause employed by them as consisting of ‘causal inference at a distance, monofinality, limited causal imagination, and overly confident causal claims.’ Imagining a causal process that is not there, not recognising that different circumstances may lead to the same outcome, theoretical sparseness about motive in human affairs, and moving too easily from observed concurrence to cause. Studies using rational addiction theory are arraigned for exhibiting these features. He outlines an alternative ‘depth ontology’ in which empirical observations are the first step in a dialogue which iterates out understanding about the underlying structures and processes that bring the world into its real being. This is in contrast to the flat ontology offered in actor network theory for example. It points us to a deep understanding of agency which is placed within a bio-ecological and social structure.

I am thinking of those too-perfect cases that illustrate what we want students to know but which turn out to be overblown or plain wrong. My case is Maines’ (2001) The Technology of Orgasm, which used to be a central example in a lecture I delivered in intoxication, technology and sexuality. It presented a beautifully written account of the origin of the vibrator in Victorian doctors simultaneous suspicion of and need to intervene in the female body. It melds two histories, psychiatry and medical technology. The book recounts the Victorian obsession with the female malady, hysteria. Lots of middle class women were reporting an array of dissatisfactions which it turned out could be treated by bringing them to orgasm. That was called ‘achieving hysterical paroxysm’ in the parlance – oh you sweet talkin’ physician!

The treatment was very popular, and doctors very bored with carrying it out. A class of medical instruments was invented which did it for them – the vibrator. A lovely tale of medicine failing to grasp the nettle but coming up with the goods nonetheless, placing doctors’ tired hands above female desire and wholly misunderstanding female sexuality. Only it turns out not be be true, according to a paper by Lieberman and Schatzberg (2018), as described in this Atlantic article. There is no evidence that hysteria was treated by inducing orgasm nor of doctors using vibrators to do so, still less of this being the main driver for the perfection of the vibrator. I kept the case but switched it to a different class on research design where it now comes up as an illustration of problems of presentism in historical research and the institutional ways academia resists correction of the record.

Academia does not let go of good cases so all of these persist way past the point they were debunked. You still see Milgram’s experiments in obedience, the Stanford Prison experiment and the Pseudopatients study quoted in introductory sociology and social psychology texts. Kuhnian paradigms are used to understand developments in scientific knowledge. Then there is the Blank Slate assumption, which is so much a baseline of sociological thinking it is barely recognised as such. Blank Slatism is the claim that individuals come into the world as similar sets of capacities which are entirely then shaped by socialisation. It appears in sociology as a set of assumptions that other claims have been debunked, for example in relation to IQ or sex differences, when they have not. The reason we cling so much to these cases is that they confirm baseline claims about the world and human nature that are dominant in sociology, and they provide nice just-so stories to give to students and each other about how things really work. People conform to groups and to authority to the extent of abandoning all moral norms. Psychiatry is sexist quackery. Inequality derives from social and economic organisation. We would rather continue using debunked cases than accept our worldview might be faulty, or rewrite those tedious powerpoint slides. On a more mundane level, changing tried and true teaching techniques is hard and there is no institutional reward for doing so. I know students love these cases so give ’em what they want! Student satisfaction is everything, and truth nothing. Why not stick with the untrue but entertaining over the true but challenging? But we are leading them on a journey, through falsity to truth.